‘More immediate than your birthday.’ This time she was looking straight at him. In her eyes he could see a firm line. This, she wouldn’t budge on.
‘D’accord. When we return to France I’ll take you to Anaïs and we will attempt to find this map of yours. Then we will marry.’
‘Wait? France? No. I have to get back to England.’
‘Not until after we are married.’
‘Hold on—’
‘Skye, let me make this incredibly, painstakingly clear to you. There is no way I’m going to let you have the map, should it exist, and leave, just trusting that you’ll come back.’
‘But I give you my word.’ Her insistence was sweet, but definitely naïve.
‘Sadly for you, that is not enough,’ he said. ‘For all I know you could be an axe murderer,’ he replied, throwing her once hotly issued words back at her with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘So. You can have the map, photograph it and send it to your sisters. You can courier the thing for all I care. But you will not leave France until we’re married.’
He could tell she was buying time. She managed to stretch out pouring a single cup of coffee. Then she spent an inordinate amount of time picking her breakfast from the feast of fruits, pastries and yogurts he’d assembled before she’d come down from her room.
He watched her hand sway over a pain au chocolat. It went back and forth and, curiously, eventually back to her lap, leaving the pastry where it was. There was something about that he didn’t like. It frustrated him that she would refuse to allow herself
something she clearly wanted. It angered him, he realised, as he reached across the table, picked up the pain au chocolat and put it decidedly on her plate.
‘I—’
Benoit cast her such a look—he might even have growled—that she immediately stopped what she’d been about to say. ‘If this is another thing, like the vegetarianism, I don’t want to hear it,’ he commanded.
Skye folded her lips between her teeth and picked the corner of the flaky pastry, popping it into her mouth. She chewed slowly at first and then reached for another piece, then another until finally she picked up the whole pastry and started to take proper mouthfuls.
He picked up his coffee and looked out into the distance, away from where Skye’s slender throat was working, clenching his jaw again against her gentle groan of pleasure that sent sparks down his spine and made his stomach curl. He cleared his throat, trying to block out the sound and restore his equilibrium.
‘I have terms of my own,’ he managed to bite out. As she was still enjoying the croissant, he took her raised eyebrow as an invitation to continue. ‘This,’ he said, gesturing between them, ‘will not evolve beyond this deal.’
She blinked. Then she swallowed. Then she squinted. ‘You mean...?’
‘No romantic notions, no daydreams of a happy ever after, no—’
‘I get it,’ she interrupted before he could say any more. ‘That won’t be a problem,’ she went on as she removed a flake of pastry from the corner of her mouth with her thumb. He watched every single second of her doing so. ‘So what would this actually look like?’
‘Real,’ he replied more quickly than he’d have liked.
She locked her gaze onto his. She seemed to bite back a sigh. ‘How do you see it working?’
In all honesty, Benoit wasn’t sure he had seen it working. He’d fully expected her to tell him to go to hell.
‘I need to be married before my birthday, which is two weeks away. I know that you have business to attend to, so afterwards I wouldn’t expect you to be chained to my side,’ he said, his vivid imagination stumbling over the image of metal loops and wrists and... ‘But the board would need to believe that the marriage is real. And my family are the board of Chalendar Enterprises so it will have to look good. There is, however, not a length of time stipulated by the by-law. Perhaps because it was written when marriages were expected to last.’
‘So we would divorce?’
No, he thought, but couldn’t quite explain to himself where that had come from, so instead replied, ‘Yes.’
‘How long?’
Benoit shrugged, aiming for a nonchalance he really didn’t feel. ‘Three years.’ He’d meant to say two.
Skye choked on her coffee. And not just a pretty throat-clearing for effect. Flakes of pastry and coffee caught in parts of her throat they shouldn’t have been in, produced a considerably violent outburst.
Three years seemed impossible. She didn’t even—
The thought stuttered to a halt, but Skye forced herself to face it. She didn’t even know if her mother would be here in three years. The almost constant sob caught in her chest, throbbed. But if Mariam Soames wasn’t alive in three years, then did it really matter what Skye’s world looked like then?